


I Closed My Eyes, and I Thought I Was Blind

by twoheadedenby



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Attempted Fixit, Character Study, Fairly extensive mentions of blood like just ask yourself where you are, Gen, ambiguous hints of femslash, gee ebri how come the moon presence lets you have THREE girlfriends, i didnt MEAN to make it gay its just that theyre both VERY pretty, weird lore speculations, you can read it how you want but its There if you wanna pick it up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 11:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9895376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoheadedenby/pseuds/twoheadedenby
Summary: It's the middle of the night, and she'll never be alright again.





	

Night was falling.

Amelia knew this, though she could not see the sky, and there were none left who could serve as her eyes. The faint sliver of warm light coming through the cracks in the doors of the Grand Cathedral had gone, and a chill had set in. She knew that she would never feel the sun on her skin again. The air was still, and naught disturbed it but the flutter of crows shifting on their perches.

Amelia cursed herself, that she might be able to hear them so vividly from within the cathedral's great stone walls. The pendant dug into the palm of her hand, an immediate and painful warning that she was only now heeding, long since doing so would have amounted to anything.

The sickness had taken her eyes long ago. She had never been healthy, but she had emerged from a childhood many would not have survived as a young woman with fierce enough dedication to secure herself a place in the Healing Church’s ranks, where she eventually caught the eye of Laurence himself.

The illness raged on, however, and she had soon found herself unable to hunt, and unable to leave her chambers without assistance thereafter. By the time her eyesight abandoned her in full she had already relegated herself full-time to the task of developing and administering the Church’s blood treatments, convinced that the secret to saving or at least prolonging her own life lay therein.

_“Remain wary of the frailty of men. Their wills are weak, minds young."_  
_"Were it not for fear, death would go unlamented."_ _  
"Seek the old blood."_

The words of her sermon rang hollow against the cathedral walls. She had allowed herself to forsake her own lessons; to twist them into something altogether meaningless.

Perhaps had she not feared her own frailty quite so much, had she not laboured with only her own imminent and unlamented death in mind, she might have prevented the Church’s fate. Perhaps she would have taken greater notice of Ludwig’s own descent into madness, or at least allowed him to see his dreams for the Church reach fruition,that he might know peace.

Perhaps she could have saved her mentor. Perhaps not, for Laurence was the first to succumb to the beast scourge, just as Amelia supposed she would now be the last. Still, had she - had any of them - understood what was happening, he might at least have been granted a swifter death.

_"Let us pray, let us wish... to partake in communion."_  
_"Let us partake in communion... and feast upon the old blood."_  
_"Our thirst for blood satiates us, soothes our fears."_ _  
"Seek the old blood."_

How had she been so naive? So _arrogant?_ To presume that anyone - and that she most of all - could harness the signifiers of beasthood as their own? Without consequence?

She might at least have allowed herself to be a lab rat. Allowed other church scientists to observe the effects of her increasingly potent concoctions before they had been unleashed on the hunters, and thence the general populace. But none dared question the authority of their new Vicar, and Laurence’s own protége besides.

She had revelled in her newfound control over her own life, able once more to walk without assistance, her other senses so heightened that sometimes she almost (but never quite) forgot the absence of her sight. She grew frighteningly thin, a constant reminder that her body was still wasting away even as she rejuvenated her mind and muscles. She had foolishly assumed the onset of a ravenous hunger was a sign she was getting better.

The first vision had been something of a breakthrough. Amelia still dreamed, of course, but never while awake, and never so vividly of places she had never seen. Suddenly, closing her eyes felt like opening them for the first time in years.

She learned quickly that what she was seeing was not her own surroundings. Stumbling around the workshop with her eyes closed led to her bumping into things not present in her field of vision.

She described the scene to an underling, of a damp and eerily empty moonlit chamber, seemingly underground. How long it had been since she had seen moonlight! Her senses rejoiced.

As soon as it was identified for her, she visited Ebrietas in her basement chamber at once. She had seen the Old One when she had sight, before they had moved Ebrietas to her current dwelling, after she had lost it. How strange, she had often thought, that the alien shape and texture of Ebrietas’s form had become more familiar than her more quotidian surroundings now that her way of understanding them had changed so drastically.

She had sought audience with Ebrietas countless times, always to withdraw additional blood samples when the lab ran dry and she needed to continue her work immediately. Her initial sense of wonderment had shaded over time into gratitude. She owed Ebrietas her life, and she knew this. It made her presence a humbling one, above and beyond her size and wondrously strange features. Amelia worried, at times, that she was asking too much of her, although she was too intoxicated by the potential of the old blood to truly consider stopping.

That time, though, she had come without needle or vials in hand. She had simply come to talk - and maybe, she hoped, to _see_. She remembers well the uncertainty of that meeting, calling out a strained greeting into the cold chamber. Remembers feeling a looming presence tower over her. Remembers how gently she had been cradled by long tendrils.

She remembers seeing herself through Ebrietas’s eyes, although she did not recognise herself at the time. She had felt a cold fury at the sight of the woman in her mind’s eye: hunched, draped in tattered robes and head swathed in dirty bandages under ragged, overgrown hair. This had not been how she envisioned herself, and it sickened her to think that it might be all others see.

Her view shifted, then, to a more familiar version of herself, the Amelia she would see when she held up a mirror to herself in her mind’s eye. She recognised the scene; one from many years past. It pained her greatly to realise she had not looked like this for untold decades.

It was her first meeting with Ebrietas. She had been giddy with youthful excitement at the time, and had been railing against her superiors for many months for the chance to see her, the literal lifeblood of the Church. She remembered being awestruck, but unafraid. Her companion had been more cautious, clinging tightly to Amelia’s sleeve. She had always been the one to keep Amelia from leaping headfirst into uncharted waters.

Amelia shook her head, trying to forcefully banish the image from her mind. She felt feelings of bereavement welling up inside her. Ebrietas let out a long, low cry. Images started to flood Amelia’s mind of moments she was certain she was not present at. She saw snatches of hushed conversation, students’ robes, several fragments of meetings with a woman clad in choir garb. Amelia strained to hear her voice, not only to understand what was being said but that she might have some way of tracking her down in the present.

The details, however, were drowned out entirely by the surge of emotion pouring from Ebrietas. It was emotion Amelia knew well, although she had tried to suppress that knowledge over the years. Loss, confusion, loneliness. The suffocating sense that part of herself was missing. Underpinning all of them, love. Amelia had not loved in a long time. She doubted she might ever love again.

She broke contact then. She was gasping for air, feeling as though a hole had been punched through her chest. Ebrietas lowed again. Amelia was clearly not the only one in pain. She felt an unexpected kinship with the Old One before her.

They met more often after that night. They would do little more than sit together in silence, exchanging memories. Many of them were sorrowful and a scant few were joyous, but both of them seemed to find some degree of inner peace simply from listening and being listened to. Their memories would take them far away through time and space, and in this they found some manner of escape from their respective prisons.

She thought, sometimes, of Willem and Micolash. She wondered if they understood in the slightest how fatuous their prattle sounded to her. _Grant us eyes!_ A rich irony coming from men with no concept of what it was to be without sight. Were they ever successful in establishing a connection with the Old Ones as they dreamed of? She hoped, selfishly, that she had become privy to something denied to them.

When she was away, Amelia worked tirelessly to refine her blood ministration. She was anxious to increase the concentration of old blood as much as she thought safe, now eager to foster her link to Ebrietas over greater physical distances, to say nothing of staving off her encroaching mortality. If there was to be salvation for her, it was within the blood of Ebrietas. This she knew for a certainty.

If only she had understood then that so very few humans shared her iron grip on life. She held out against the late-stage symptoms of the plague as men twice her size and of robust health succumbed, possessing as they did a mere fraction of her willpower. She had assumed that anything her thin, frail body could tolerate, any human could. And she had been wrong.

_"_ _But beware the frailty of men. Their wills are weak, minds young."_  
_"The foul beasts will dangle nectar and lure the meek into the depths."_ _  
"Remain wary of the frailty of men..."_

She had been the last to abandon the orphanage. Many of the choir members had been reluctant to leave their work behind, but it was soon apparent that all who remained would end up dead or transfigured.There was nothing to be done for the children, or what it was that remained of them.

It was her duty as Vicar, of course, that Amelia see them all to safety before herself. However, she needed to say goodbye, too, for her own sake. She had stumbled through the gardens, crushing lumenflowers carelessly underfoot, down the path to the elevator, cutting her fingers and bruising her knees trying to frantically keep her bearing by grasping for the walls. She was out of breath when she arrived, her lungs rattling.

Ebrietas was as slow and methodical as ever in making her approach. She didn’t seem to comprehend the urgency in Amelia’s actions. Amelia brushed aside an inquisitive tendril, though it burned to reject her so.

“I have to leave,” she said, shaking from both exertion and distress. Ebrietas moaned, and even without a link between them she understood the pain in it.

“I have no choice,” she said. “It’s all I can do to seal the Upper Cathedral Ward. You’ll be… Safe, here.”

_Safe from me_ _,_  Amelia thought. Ebrietas cried once more. _And alone._

“We’re both alone, now,” she said. “There’s nobody left.”

She could sense agitated flailing around her. “I can’t stay. I don’t have much time left. You won’t see me again.”

“I’m sorry.”

Amelia choked out the last few syllables, acutely aware that both she and Ebrietas had experienced variations of this moment before. She turned on her heel and grasped until she found the outline of the archway. She longed to stay for one last touch, but she knew she would never be able to leave.

The journey to Grand Cathedral was hard and terrifying. She had made the trip many times, but never without guidance, and never with the sound of the world going to hell around her ringing in her ears. She knew that if she died at that moment, it would be a mercy. Once she had sealed the doors behind her, there was nothing left for her to do. She simply wanted to spend her last moments praying, and seeking guidance.

It took strength she didn’t even know her body still contained to swing the doors of the Grand Cathedral wide open, and her body was a cacophony of aches by the time she reached the head of the stairs. She fell to her knees in front of the place she knew Laurence’s skull rested, and sought it out with her fingers until she felt its jagged, distended outline.

There was nothing. The voice of the long-dead First Vicar did not come to her. The sermon she had been repeating her whole life long had not taken on new meaning. She clutched the gold pendant to her chest, fearing that to let go of it would be to lose it forever, and in losing it lose herself.

She would just have to die without answers. Reason had abandoned this world, and she should have known better than to think it would not abandon her too. There was nothing for it but to enjoy her last sunset.

Not long after, Amelia could tell that her time had come. She shook violently, and her body was wracked with coughing fits. She heard something wet spatter the floor tiles, and she knew that it was her own blood - if there was anything left in it that could truly be called ‘hers’.

It happened mostly at once. She was overcome with pain, white-hot through her bones. Amelia was no stranger to pain, but this was beyond even her comprehension. She heard bones crack and felt skin and clothes tear, two points of agony boring themselves right into her skull above her eyes. She wondered how she was still conscious for this, prayed not to be. Then she wasn’t.

_I have to leave_.

The words felt like white noise, barely audible above the din surrounding them.

_I have no choice_.

The words struggled to make themselves heard over scents and sounds that she had never known in life.

_You’ll be safe here_.

The truth dawned slowly. Nobody was speaking to her. Ebrietas was trying to show her something.

_We’re both alone, now_.

_Why are you trying to show me this?_ Amelia tried to speak, but found that her throat could not form words. Found that it was making sounds of its own without her. She was dimly aware of her body thrashing, though she was not sending the signals to do so, nor was the sensation transmitted from limbs she understood.

_I don’t have much time left._

Suddenly, Amelia understood. She wasn’t dead. Nor had she succumbed to beasthood. Not entirely, at least.

_I’m sorry_.

Amelia tried, with enormous strain, to conjure some emotion or mental image to signal Ebrietas. She was embroiled in a thick red haze, a backseat passenger in her own mind.

_I have to leave. I have no choice_.

Why was she showing her these same fragments of conversation, over and over again? Had it not been painful enough for both of them the first time?

_You’ll be safe here. We’re both alone, now._

Was Ebrietas… mocking her? Not mockery, perhaps, but disagreement?

_I don’t have much time left._

_More than I realised_ , Amelia supposed to herself.

_I’m sorry_.

That one was accompanied by a pang of sorrow, and Amelia took it as a genuine apology.

_I don’t understand_ , thought Amelia, struggling to make her thoughts coherent enough for Ebrietas to possibly understand over the deafening roar coming from within and without her.

Ebrietas was silent then. Either she also did not understand, or she could not explain.

Amelia could feel her body continuing to rage and thrash through the Cathedral. _Her body?_ This was not her body. She had never felt such crude, angry instinct. She had never felt such strength in her limbs, or such life in her chest.

She had never felt so little pain.

Could it be…? Was this the answer that had evaded her all this time? Not to fear human frailty, but to allow it to run its course? She had seen so many turn to beasts before her eyes, some of them most dear to her. Had any of them been conscious of the change, as she was now? Could they have been saved? Could she?

She was struggling to keep her thoughts straight, and Ebrietas’s insistent communication was making it harder, but she would not let up. Amelia let her own thought process drift, worried though she was that it would take her consciousness with her.

_She saw the lower part of Ebrietas’s body from above, through the Old One’s eyes._ It was now that Amelia realised she still could not see out of her own. _Nestled against her was Amelia, sleeping off a bout of sickness that had seized her during one of their meetings, as it sometimes did. Ebrietas had her wings curled around her in a gesture of shelter._

Amelia remembered that day. She remembered the calm sense of companionship she had felt in the moments before her sleep. Under Ebrietas’s gentle insistence, the calm radiated, extending past what she perceived as the limits of her own consciousness to quiet the din surrounding her.

Ebrietas was encouraging her to sleep again, extending another form of protection towards her this time. The sleepiness was almost as overpowering as the other sensations she had been fending off, but she trusted Ebrietas to allow herself to give in to this one. She only had to believe that she would wake up again.

She would not lose herself. She was not alone. And for the first time in a very long time, she was not afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey so it always REALLY bothered me that Vicar Amelia is held with great importance both by the game and by the organisation she belongs to and there is almost ZERO canon lore about her, so I picked up the tiny shreds of what we were given and ran with them (taking the lore into my own hands, if you will). This fic also owes a great debt to AO3 user thalassashells for laying much of the groundwork regarding this portrayal of Ebrietas.
> 
> Big shout out to Car Seat Headrest and their song High To Death for inspiring big Bloodborne Mood, and granting this fic its title/summary!


End file.
